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Article #4531BESM-6 again
From: a... Vadim G. Antonov
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 1990 18:09
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 1990 18:09
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I like to add a few words about some amazing features of BESM-6. Talking about how-to-turn-off-machine I forgot to say that BESM has a software feature to block power turnoff (I think it's a quite valuable idea, especially for Unix machines; what's about self-turning-on machines? ;-). Another piece of BESM's hardware is a drum printers ACPU-128 (stands for Alphabetic-Numeric Printing Device, oh days of yore!) These printers have a funny control: each hammer can be moved by setting or clearing bits in the register. Interrupt per each rotating drum position generated. So, driver should catch interrupts and recalculate positions of hammers. As a result the best printer driver takes 12% of CPU per one device. Another feature of such printer control is *very* funny: if driver failed to handle interrupt at a time the line of garbage appeared. One can also calculate a loading of the machine by measuring distances between baseline and letters. Vadim Antonov DEMOS, Moscow, USSR (It is NOT a joke!)
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!sunic!news.funet.fi!funic!fuug!demos!avg From: a...@hq.demos.su (Vadim G. Antonov) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: BESM-6 again Message-ID: <1990Sep17.180942.8086@hq.demos.su> Date: 17 Sep 90 18:09:42 GMT Reply-To: a...@hq.demos.su (Vadim G. Antonov) Organization: DEMOS, Moscow, USSR Lines: 24 Posted: Mon Sep 17 19:09:42 1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit